This is a hilarious mashup, but it’ll only make sense if you’ve seen this.

[via Daring Fireball.]

I have a spy at The Weekly Standard—let’s call him Z.—and he emailed me earlier today to say that Bill Kristol locked himself in his office first thing this morning so he could go into InDesign and crank out his latest Standard column about Sarah Palin. Kristol’s been writing about Palin for both the Standard and The New York Times, so he’s having trouble coming up with fresh justifications for her candidacy. It’s pretty thin gruel at this point, and he’s getting frustrated. Apparently his cursing has been audible throughout the floor all morning. Kristol stepped out for lunch a few minutes ago, and Z. went into the publishing system and printed up a copy of Kristol’s work-in-progress. Z. just emailed me a scan of the page:

(Visit the magazine covers tag for more exclusive Panopticist scoops.)

The scan might be hard to read at this size, so I’ve retyped the text and posted it after the jump.

[Continue reading "Exclusive: William Kristol Is Having Trouble Writing His Next Column About Sarah Palin"...]

I wrote a post last year about my father’s professional chess career in the ’50s and ’60s and his connection to Bobby Fischer. At the end of that post, I mentioned that he’s spent many years working on a big, definitive book about blindfold chess—the art of playing without sight of the board or the pieces. It’s an extraordinary intellectual feat that has a long, colorful history, and it’s deeply related to my father’s other main lifelong interest, psychology. (He retired from Indiana University in the mid-’90s after many years as a distinguished professor of psychology.) The book, which my father wrote with a co-author, John Knott, is now in the final stages of publication, and it should be out by the end of the year. I’ve designed a teaser site, blindfoldchess.net, that features a summary of the book and links where you can preorder a copy. I pushed the site live yesterday. Check it out.

When the book comes out, I’ll be posting an in-depth Q&A with my father about the rich intellectual and psychological history of this amazing skill.

Here’s a reprint of the book summary from the site:

[Continue reading "New Teaser Site for My Father’s Upcoming Book About Blindfold Chess"...]

This week’s issue just arrived in the mail, and it’s a keeper:

(Yes, I made this. For more stuff like it, see the magazine covers tag. The two primary fonts are Knockout and Mercury, both from the geniuses at Hoefler & Frere-Jones.)

More Potus info is here.

I’ve been trying to hatch another Palin-related magazine spoof, because it’s fertile ground and I’m confident I’ll be able to come up with some funny concepts. But right now, almost two weeks into this festival of absurdity, it’s clear who’s ultimately responsible for how badly Obama is getting hammered this week: Obama himself. Yes, the media are not shying away from their perennial role as Bringers of the Stupid. Yes, Palin’s shortcomings are terrifyingly obvious, and McCain has now made it utterly clear (if it wasn’t clear already) that he’ll do anything to get elected, even if it means sacrificing the safety and power of the country he claims to love so much. Yes, the so-called intellectuals of the right (Bill Kristol, Victor Davis Hanson, ad nauseam) are contorting themselves into pretzels to defend a VP nominee whose lack of qualifications would trigger an attack of apoplexy if she were the other side’s candidate. It’s all ridiculous.

But as many smart observers have apoplectically pointed out in the last 24 to 48 hours, Obama desperately needs to launch the aggressive war we always knew he’d have to fight to win. The McCain campaign has Obama on the defensive—a preposterous turn of events, given the dozens of major lines of attack that could be launched at McCain.

As Josh Marshall wrote earlier today, “Winning and losing is never fully in one’s control — not in politics or in life. What is always within our control is how we fight and bear up under pressure.” Obama’s gotta pull out his fists and start pummeling McCain and Palin—and he needs to have hundreds of surrogates out there doing the same thing every single day. We Obama supporters love many things about our candidate, and one of them is his temperament: He’s honest, thoughtful, gentlemanly, fair-thinking, even-keeled, not impetuous, and doesn’t appear to get angry easily. These would all be very good qualities in a president. But Obama has to get to the White House first. He appears to be afraid of bruising his own fists, when he should mainly be worrying about whether his fists have so much power that they’ll launch their target into low-earth orbit.

The Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry were devastating for two reasons. They were devastating in a direct, literal way, because they made a significant portion of the electorate believe that John Kerry faked the details of his military heroism, and thus was dishonest and not worthy of the presidency. But more important, the attacks were devastating in an indirect, metaphorical way, because they convinced millions of undecided voters that John Kerry didn’t know how to defend himself. And if he couldn’t defend himself, how could he defend his country? Voters formed an impression of Kerry as a bullied loser instead of an aggressive fighter—and aggressive fighters get elected, bullied losers don’t. Obama is facing exactly the same problem right now. If, in the next couple of days, the Obama campaign doesn’t launch a highly coordinated assault on McCain/Palin’s countless weaknesses, he’s going to lose the literal battle as well as the metaphorical one. And then we’re all doomed.

It’s hard to see how the Obama campaign will go from 0 to 60 200 in a matter of days, but that’s what’s necessary—and the Obama campaign knew, or for god’s sake should have known, that all of this was coming. Right now they seem to be caught totally flat-footed. How could they not have known what they’d be dealing with? This suggestion from Josh Marshall would be a good start. Obama must—and can!—seize the narrative within the next week. But will he? I’m getting nervous.

Via coudal.com, two photos from a gorgeous slideshow of Iceland images by San Francisco-based photographer Tim Gasperak. I’ve always wanted to visit Iceland, and I’m hoping to take a vacation there soon.

People likey the porn spoofs, so here’s footage from an incredibly odd artifact I discovered during my search for Kubrick porn: an adult version of Alice in Wonderland from 1976. This ain’t no filmed-in-one-afternoon quickie—it’s a musical comedy that combines elaborate song-and-dance numbers with hardcore sex. Billed as “An X-Rated Musical Fantasy” and produced by the same man who brought the world Flesh Gordon, it’s one of the more artistically ambitious porn spoofs you’ll ever see. Judging from my quick scroll through the video—it’s all too weird for me to spend much time actually watching it—the singing and dancing is much more prominent than the hardcore sex. But there’s a fair amount of that, too. In the clip below, Alice, a once-virginal librarian whose libido has just been awakened, gives some help to an impotent Humpty-Dumpty, who closely resembles Stanford from Sex and the City. This footage is pretty tame, because I edited out a few minutes of lesbian action between the two nurses. But it still isn’t safe for work, so be careful.

Kristine De Bell, who played Alice, was a former Playboy playmate who went on to appear in Meatballs (with Chris Makepeace!) and various other mainstream films and TV shows. A restored version of Alice in Wonderland was released on DVD in December, and it’s available on Amazon. It apparently includes both an X-rated version and an XXX-rated version.

Alice in Wonderland apparently got a lot of attention upon its release. Roger Ebert even reviewed it. Here’s an excerpt from Ebert’s review:

[Continue reading "Alice in Wonderland: The 1976 Musical-Comedy Porn Spoof"...]

I visited Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers during a visit to Los Angeles in 1994 and was utterly awestruck. Rodia’s sui generis creation is truly one of the greatest examples of American outsider art. This 12-minute documentary from 1957 contains interviews with Rodia, who spoke with a thick Italian accent, as well as excellent footage from the surrounding neighborhood. (It also features a weirdly Twilight Zone-ish score.) I found this on Rick Prelinger’s archive.org a couple of years ago and was planning to upload it to YouTube myself, but I just discovered that it’s there already. Bonus Simon Rodia fact: He appears in the collage on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s.

This awesome clip shows a barely pubescent Jimmy Page playing skiffle on a British TV show in the late ’50s. Text in the clip says “1957,” which would mean Page is 13 years old here, but Wikipedia asserts that Page didn’t start playing guitar until he was 14. So let’s guess that this is from 1958, and Page is 14. Whatever his age, this is a fantastic artifact. But where’s his violin bow?

The host is a guy named Huw Weldon.

Related entry: Jimmy Page Was My Co-Pilot.

I’ve been designing websites for a few good friends recently, including the book critic and former Lingua Franca and Arts & Letters Daily staffer Matthew Price; the science writer Peter Dizikes; and the science and technology writer Clive Thompson, who wrote the fine piece about “ambient awareness” that appeared in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine. Matt’s and Peter’s sites are new; Clive’s site, Collision Detection, is a redesign. Check ’em out!

I swear I’m interested in things other than text and numerals that appear onscreen during television shows, but this is so interesting I have to share.

Fringe, the new Fox show co-created by Lost visionary J.J. Abrams, debuts tomorrow night at 8 p.m. I found a leaked version of the pilot a couple of months ago, but I didn’t get around to watching it until last night. Judging from the pilot, it’s basically a mediocre X-Files retread: federal agents + paranormal investigations + sinister bureaucracy + rampant paranoia. The cast includes Lance Reddick, late of The Wire and recently of Lost, and I love him. But otherwise the whole operation seems a bit contrived.

I was, however, struck by the very unusual way that the show identifies locations onscreen. The X-Files, for instance, handled these in the typical, longstanding way. If Mulder and Scully were in, say, Virginia, a location-and-time stamp would be displayed at the bottom of the opening shot of the sequence:

Arlington, Virginia
4:32 a.m.

Fringe handles location IDs in a way I’ve never seen before, at least on television: Each one is placed into the actual scene as a physical element that the characters pass by or the camera swoops through. I find this approach to be really jarring and show-offy. Have you ever seen anything like this before? (This series of clips includes one ID of a foreign location, but that information doesn’t really spoil anything.)

It’s possible that these will have been changed in the version that will be broadcast tomorrow night, but this is how things looked in the pilot I acquired in late June.

As The New York Times reported in May, Sesame Workshop is preparing a new version of the classic ’70s children’s show The Electric Company, which I wrote about lovingly in 2006. The producers just put a short teaser for the new incarnation on YouTube. Not sure I like this, but hey, I have enormous nostalgia for the original version, and I’m not eight years old right now:

Here is the Times’s description of the reboot:

Refitted for the age of hip-hop and informed by decades of further educational research on reading, the 2009 version of “The Electric Company” is a weekly, more danceable version of its former daily self. The series, which is expected to make its debut in January, faces challenges the original never did (trying to stand out amid so much children’s programming and to shake the stigma of educational television) as well as familiar ones (trying to make reading a positive experience for youngsters).

Also in May, TV Week reported that “the show’s new format will encompass interactive online elements and community-based activities across the country, in addition to adapting a more contemporary style. … Writers for the new incarnation include Willie Reale (‘A Year With Frog and Toad’), Jeff and Craig Cox (‘Blades of Glory’) and Jerome Hairston (‘Law & Order: Criminal Intent’). The show’s musical directors are Chris Jackson, Thomas Kail and Bill Sherman, all from Broadway musical ‘In the Heights.’”

My longtime web host, pair.com, shut down Panopticist for two hours yesterday afternoon because of the burst of traffic I’ve gotten in the week since I relaunched the site. That wasn’t cool, so I’ve ported everything over to a different web host, Media Temple. If you notice anything wonky, please let me know in the comments or via email (hearst@nyc.rr.com). Thanks…

Or so it might seem. One doesn’t have to have one’s mind completely in the gutter to think that maybe, just maybe, this image was an unfortunate choice for the cover of a children’s book:

[spotted here via here.]

All Macs come bundled with a handful of dingbat fonts that most people never use, including Apple Symbols, Webdings, and Wingdings 1, 2, and 3. These collections contain a lot of versatile glyphs that are useful in all kinds of everyday graphical situations. But they also include dozens of mystifying icons whose origins and meaning are totally opaque. Like the one at left: What the hell does it signify? Is it a bulb-rest for a tired apostrophe? A whistle seat? A logo for a secret society? I bet Jonathan Hoefler would know.

This Sarah Palin nomination is going great! And now she’s laid out her geopolitical philosophy in the new issue of Foreign Affairs.

(Yes, I made this. Go here for more stuff like it.)

By now you’ve probably heard that Sarah Palin’s 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, is five months pregnant. Given the mounting evidence that the vetting of Palin was rushed and incomplete, and the fact that a competent, clear-thinking politician would have scratched Palin from the running-mate short list upon learning of the daughter’s pregnancy (if not for other reasons), isn’t it possible that Palin herself only learned of Bristol’s pregnancy within the last 48 hours? In other words, isn’t it easy to imagine a scenario wherein Bristol was too terrified to tell her mother that she was pregnant, and put off telling her, then felt she had to say something after her mother became McCain’s running mate? It’s hard to believe that Palin wouldn’t have mentioned her daughter’s condition to the McCain campaign, but it’s almost as hard to believe that McCain would have chosen her if he’d known. The McCain campaign is acting like everything is going according to plan, but how can that possibly be true?

Obviously it might not have happened this way. But isn’t it conceivable?